from Hacker News

Seeking explanations: Election security (paper or electronic voting)

by tdehnel on 8/21/24, 12:06 AM with 3 comments

• by TacticalCoder on 8/21/24, 12:40 AM

  > But it would be useful to educate the average person on why that can have trust in our elections (paper or electronic voting).

  The problem with trust is that all it takes is one example of cheating to shatter that belief.

  We had a president elected with votes known to be facetious: it has been caught with numbers not adding up. Maduro in Venezuela.

  And in the US there are several states who have reported more than dubious behavior.

  And when people try to look in the matter, a mysterious "update" to the voting machine happens and then all the counts are lost.

  And people have to trust that?

  You to be one heck of a government-loving person to look the other way and pretend that there's no fraud ongoing.

  You could say stuff like "on average it's fair" or "there's cheating in only 3 of the 52 states" or "there's too little cheating for it to influence the result".

  But you cannot say: "Voting is 100% fair, we need to educate the masses so that they understand that".

• by infotainment on 8/21/24, 3:36 AM

  The best voting machines I used, IMO, combined electronic and paper ballots. Wrote my vote, and then inserted it into the machine, which scanned the ballot, indicated that it had scanned properly, and put it into a box.

  Gives you the best of both worlds: a quick electronic tally, but a full paper trail for auditing purposes.

• by h2odragon on 8/21/24, 1:00 AM

  Perhaps the voting machines could make their source available; and include some signature that would hopefully allow a voter to verify the source they looked at was that which was running.

  Paper ballots do seem to be simpler.